


Lovers' Knot

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Frottage, Humour, M/M, Older Characters, Oral Sex, Retirement, Sussex, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 21:31:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3355976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes cannot abide sentiment. He likes sex, though. And John Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lovers' Knot

**Author's Note:**

> Written within 24 hours for the come_at_once porn tag challenge, to the prompt "too good to be true" from mistyzeo. I hope she will not mind my coining one of her choicer ficly phrases. Somewhat more humour and romance than porn – well, it is Valentine’s Day, after all.
> 
> More about Victorian (all right, Edwardian if it's 1904. You get the drift) Valentine's Day customs:
> 
> http://home.kendra.com/victorianrituals/Victor/val.htm

The world’s only – and even if he were not the only one he would be, without doubt, the greatest – consulting detective introduced his craft to me, as my oldest readers will recall, obliquely, in writing. ‘The Book of Life’ remains ever open to him. At a glance, a thousand tiny clues paint on the canvas of his artist’s mind a portrait of a person’s occupation, state of mind, recent haunts, and what they might want from Sherlock Holmes. It is his signature genius to observe, and at once to know, your deepest desires, even the ones you hide from yourself.

I am by no means the exception.

February, our first in Sussex, began with rain. It had been a wretchedly wet winter all told. Holmes’ idea that we should set up as smallholders in our retirement floated miserably on the swollen stream at the bottom of the field and hung in gloomy clouds along the line of still-empty beehives at the top. At Christmas we had propped our cards on the mantelpiece and enjoyed the only sight of English village greens picturesque with snow that we had had since moving from London. Otherwise it was nothing but rain, rain, rain, with the occasional downright downpour for the sake of variety.

Since the New Year, Holmes had taken to stalking outside every day in a fisherman’s oilskin too big for his frame, planning in his head the clearing and planting to be done. I sat inside by the fire, war-worn bones creaking in time to the drumbeat of raindrops on the tin roof of the scullery.

“I hope you will not come to regret this,” he said suddenly, as he came in that February afternoon, shedding another small, melancholy waterfall on the doorstep. With a start, I realised he meant all of it – not only retirement to the country, but retirement with him, this new life I had never hoped for until he handed it, with his heart, over to me like so much hidden treasure.

“Never. Never in a dozen lifetimes.” 

Never in a hundred.

He turned so I would not see his face, but after all these years, I knew a little of observation and deduction. Uncertainty, hesitation, fear, fell away as he spread his coat across the fireguard and sat in the chair opposite me, contentedly filling his pipe and affecting a nonchalant air. All would be well.

I glanced at the calendar, thinking of Spring and of dry days to come. Less than a week to go before the festival of lovers: of Saint Valentine, martyr. Birds would choose their mates (weather permitting, no doubt), postmen everywhere would groan under the weight of paper lace and poorly-written verse, of longing and entreaty and the very softest of emotions.

Not here, of course. Vulgar sentiment held no sway in this house. Certainly not. Love there was, unspoken, demonstrated in uncounted ways other than in words, in the dance of every day spent learning each other anew in this new place, the embraces of every night, love plastered into the very walls. I knew it. The scales of life were tipped by the gods so very far in my favour.

Sometimes, though, mere mortal man has a yen for a little sentiment.

We did not live in each others' pockets, but spent the greater part of each day busy with our own pursuits. I wrote; he tramped about in the rain. I read a novel; he shut himself up in the attic with his scrapbooks and chemicals. I went to the village; he made himself scarce if any of the villagers called.

Nevertheless, the hairs on the back of my neck told me he was up to something in the days following. It was no use asking. He had not lost his love of sleight of hand and the conjuror’s flourish to an audience’s applause.

On the morning of the fourteenth, we rose after the postman’s first knock. On the mat was a solitary, bulky package addressed to me but bearing no stamp. The handwriting was disguised but Holmes’ ‘t’ is quite singular. At the breakfast table, he was sorting through the correspondence that had actually come through the post. I held my prize under his nose and coughed.

“You had best open it then, hadn’t you, my boy?” he replied, without lifting his eyes from the laundry bill but with a tremor in his voice to which thumbscrews would not have induced him to admit.

Inside, wrapped in old newspaper, was an intricate confection of twine a good ten inches across – a sailor’s fancy knot. It seemed to be still spattered with ship’s pitch but as I looked closer, I saw it was Indian ink - every inch was written on in a continuous stream of text so tiny one would need…

He passed me his magnifying glass across the table.

 _“My dear Watson..._ ” Without thought, I had begun to read it aloud and he looked up, breath caught, eyes wide with a sort of panic.

No. You wrote it, my friend, my spouse: you must own it. I cleared my throat and began again.

“ _My dear Watson, this is a day traditionally set aside for expressions of affection. As you know, such does not come easily to me. _”__

So far, so unexceptional. I wondered how long that had sat there, drying, before he went on to the next part, before he meandered around the bend in the knot and tied himself in its coils.

_“ One ought, so I understand, to refer to flowers, to birds, to bees, to sweetness and light. However it is yet again a filthy, wet day, the flowers are still in the ground, the birds keep to their roosts, I cannot find anyone to sell me any bees yet and if I have often shed light, God knows there has been little enough sweetness in me. You are all I have of that, John."_

__That was it. He had run out of space._ _

__He had tried, tried so hard to give me a token of affection that fitted the day, had seen me look at that calendar a week before and divined that I needed him to meet my more conventional self half-way, even if only this once. I struggled, I clapped my hand over my mouth, I pushed my handkerchief between my lips, but it was all useless. Thirty seconds after reading his attempt at romance, I was nearly rolling on the floor, helpless with laughter. Holmes for his part sat stricken, gripping the magnifier like a shield. At long last I took hold of myself and had mercy on him._ _

__“Oh, come here, you ridiculous man.”_ _

__I wrapped him in my arms and kissed his mouth, his neck, his white throat exposed by the mouse-coloured dressing gown that I think he will wear until it is fit only for a dog’s bed._ _

__My hands began to wander. I wanted him, in his magnificent isolation, his amazing quickness of mind and infuriating denseness, and goodness, of heart. Only him._ _

__“Upstairs.”_ _

__“I thought…last night, you said…”_ _

__“Last night, I had not had a love letter from Sherlock Holmes.”_ _

__In truth I might have had him there and then, on the hearthrug or braced against the chair back - found some creative use for that length of twine - but the flagstones chilled my feet even though the rug. The warmth of our bed beckoned._ _

__Under the covers, we stripped and knotted ourselves together, warming and wrestling each other into impossible heat and implausible positions._ _

__“Christ, John, take your hand off my prick and put your mouth down there before I lose all patience.”_ _

__I vowed he should lose it soon enough either way. Holding his thighs apart as he locked heels around my shoulders, I tasted the soft skin sheathing his cockstand, dragging my lips and tongue from base to tip, teasing him with a hand behind his balls all the while. When he tried to shift, to guide me to take the glistening tip fully inside, I switched to attend to his hip bones and the crease of his thigh – the left is so much more sensitive than the right, he gasps and writhes at my touch there, at my very breath._ _

__When I do suckle him, always after many feints and torments, he cries out then, cries to heaven from the garden of earthly delights. He did it then, in the white morning light, groaning with every breath in, chanting “Yes” with every breath out. He thrust into my mouth, fast and shallow, pressed back against the pillows, his clenched fists full of the linen sheets, abandoned to pleasure._ _

__He wants to wait, to control himself, but he cannot. Heat, desire, sex alone undoes him utterly: that is his – our - secret. That morning he longed to delay the climax, to resist the crest of the wave, the roll of release and the pitch of the _petit mort_. Yet he longed even more to give in, to chase it down, to come and come and come until he surrendered entire, Mind under Matter._ _

__He has never trusted another soul as he trusts me, with his lack of control. He came virgin to me the first time we lay together and he had not warned me. I was glad, it was shocking, gloriously surprising, to see him transformed and transported so. I had never guessed it would be like that. The first time he held me down, swore, screamed. He had been all mind to me before, and that is not who he is. He is a creature of sense as well, of taste and smell and touch. I should have known, really, from the start, from the way he understood the world – through those same senses._ _

__The way he understands me also. He bit at my fleshy self – grown plump with contentment here - with nips and pinches of pearl teeth and ivory fingers on my belly and buttocks, sharp and gentle all at once, as if he would eat me given half the chance. He tangled himself limb around limb, rubbed his chest and flanks against my loins and back, rode me from behind, his prick sliding along my spine, going lower, separating me where I crack in two, stroking all the tender, trembling places until I cracked again, broke and spilled on the mattress under me, wet with his sweat and seed above me and mine under, until we lay limp, stinking of spunk and triumph and laughing for joy._ _

__At last we disengaged, surveying the ruin of the bedclothes with raised eyebrows and pardonable pride. We crawled back into each others' arms, kissing long and deep to mark the last ebbing of passion._ _

__Sometimes, my dear Holmes, you are altogether too good to be true.”_ _

__“Just as well you lie so much in your stories, then, isn’t it?”_ _


End file.
